Havana is hot.
The heat is a malign plague invading everything. The heat descends like a tight, stretchy cloak of red silk, wrapping itself round bodies bodies, trees and things, to inject there the dark poison of despair and a slower, certain death. It is a punishment without appeal... It tortures mangy, forlorn steet dogs searching for a lake in the desert; old men dragging sticks that are more exhausted than their own legs...
Lieutenant Mario Conde, known to everyone as the Count, has made his decisions. Shunned by sons of childhood friends for being a policeman, he is now shunned by some colleagues for a previous 'disagreement', suspended and put on form-filling.
With Skinny Carlos, now wheelchair-bound and not-so-skinny, now too fat to risk a reunion with a childhood sweetheart, he visit bars that are dangerous for someone with his past, and liable to erupt into sudden violence.
A body is found by the Havana Woods, wearing a scarlet dress. Sergeant Palacious brings him up to speed.
"What do you reckon, Conde? Yes, it's a man. Dressed and face painted like a woman. Now we've got murdered transvestites, we're almost part of the developed world. At this rate we'll soon be making rockets and going to the moon..."
This a tough, gritty Havana of hard characters, and their comments on sexuality and many references to skin colour presumably reflect a Cuban reality.
It is going to be tough investigation for Conde: "The fact is I love prejudice and can't stand pansies."
Worse, the victim is well connected and powerful people are asking for discretion, that links must not not be made between an important family and "that mess of transvestites and queers their son was mixed up with."
The Bitter Lemon website tells us;
Leonardo Padura was born in 1955 in Havana and lives in Cuba. He has published a number of short-story collections and literary essays but international fame came with the Havana Quartet, all featuring Inspector Mario Conde.
Like many others of his generation, Padura had faced the question of leaving Cuba, particularly in the late 80s and early 90s, when living conditions deteriorated sharply as Russian aid evaporated. He chose to stay. And to write beautiful ironic novels in which Soviet-style socialism is condemned by implication through scenes of Havana life where even the police are savagely policed."
Padura's writing is rich and dense, laden with vivid imagery, and the dialogue crackles with idioms that that must have challenged translator Peter Bush; indeed, as the Count would say, "I'll bet my buttocks on it."
(I read Havana Red believing it to be the first in a series, but it is actually number I should have started Las cuatro estaciones (The Four Seasons) with Havana Blue.)
Havana Red by Leonardo Padura, trans Peter Bush, published by Bitter Lemon Press